


i can go anywhere i want (just not home)

by sadprose



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Angst, Angst WITHOUT a happy ending I'm being upfront about this, Clarke makes it to space, F/M, How The Fuck Do People Tag Things, Kinda?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:47:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29609628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadprose/pseuds/sadprose
Summary: At night she’s always there, when it’s dead silent and everyone’s asleep. It’s silent, he hears the clock ticking, hears his heartbeat and his shallow breaths, but never Clarke’s, and that’s how Bellamy knows she’s not here.Or: Clarke makes it to space, but she's dead and she doesn't know it yet.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 11
Kudos: 40





	i can go anywhere i want (just not home)

**Author's Note:**

> hello oomfs and non-oomfs. i see we are still not cured of the disease called bellarke in the big year of 2021. 
> 
> i hope you like this absolute mess of feelings. if you don't, please do not leave criticism, even constructive, because i will cry. but i really do hope this fic is ok <3 title from our lord and savior taylor swift's my tears ricochet aka bellarke anthem

“Can’t sleep?” Bellamy asks, before she can even knock.

“Shut up,” Clarke mutters, lighthearted from behind the door to Bellamy’s room. He’s glad she comes to him instead of anyone else.

It’s been a rough few weeks since they’d arrived at the ring, narrowly escaping death, so Bellamy knows all of them—Clarke, most of all—would have trouble settling in. So he lets her in his space, lets her keep him company, knowing it’s just as much for her sanity as it is for him.

She looks different now, Bellamy thinks, maybe even unrecognizable. She’s all charred flesh and burnt hands that he once loved holding. Her face doesn’t look anything like her except for the blue of her eyes that he imagines was once the color of the ocean, back when the earth was still alive and not the sorry excuse of a planet it is now.

Bellamy was never shaken by the sight of her, no— it was Clarke, the Clarke he once knew and, dare he say, loved. She was still Clarke and he will desperately accept her in any form that she comes as, because he knows too fucking well that he left Clarke behind to die. He is certain she did. Clarke is, without a shadow of a doubt, dead.

He doesn’t know how it’s come to this. Bellamy was never religious—he thought ghosts were a thing of the past, back when humans had the luxury to worry about the afterlife instead of surviving. But this Clarke—he couldn’t touch her, he couldn’t bring himself to. She was always close enough that he knows she’s there, but never close enough to touch. It’s Clarke, still, and he could never turn her away.

Tonight she begs him to tell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice again—one of her favorites. There’s just something about the tragedy of it all, she reasons. Bellamy gives in to her wishes and it's not long before she falls asleep on the tiny couch across the foot of his bed. She’s gone when he wakes up in the morning and he doesn’t bother looking for her. 

…

On most days Clarke keeps him company in the kitchen when he’s on dish duty. “I can help,” she insists, lighthearted, but he brushes her off and tells her it’s fine. Instead she tells him stories about the Romans (despite his arguments that they’re nothing more than cheap Greek remakes) and he listens intently. He lets her talk most of the time because he doesn’t know how long he’ll have her like this.

Sometimes Bellamy spots Raven at the corner of his eye when he’s talking to Clarke, and she’s standing at the doorway looking sadly at him. Later at dinner Raven asks him if he’s doing okay, and if he misses Clarke.

“Yeah,” he sighs, “every day.” Raven doesn’t press further, and they eat their algae in silence. Clarke is quiet beside him, not quite understanding why Raven talks about her like she’s not in the room. 

Monty worries about him, too, when they’re scouring vacant rooms that once belonged to people they knew. Bellamy finds a barely-read copy of _The Odyssey_ one day and accidentally calls out for Clarke when Monty is beside him. He realizes his mistake, but Monty doesn’t comment.

“This is gonna sound crazy, but I think I can hear Clarke, sometimes,” he tells Emori, who’s been an unexpected but welcome friend. She doesn’t call him crazy; instead she tells him Grounder stories about how their dead sometimes could still communicate with them. Bellamy’s grateful Clarke wasn’t there to hear that. He doesn’t want her to find out just yet.

Murphy’s infinitely more standoffish than anyone else and thinks he’s insane, tells him to move on. When Bellamy accidentally lets her name slip during dinner, Murphy spits in his face and scoffs: “Clarke’s dead, Bellamy. You left her, remember?”

The only thing that stopped him from beating Murphy up was Clarke, at ease in the common area, reading a book. He doesn’t want to bother her, doesn’t want her to worry about a petty fight with Murphy.

Clarke wanders into his room right after the lights are switched off. She tells him she doesn’t know why the others are ignoring her, as if she doesn’t exist, as if she’s dead, so she and waits for everyone to retreat to their quarters before appearing at Bellamy’s door.

…

At night she’s always there, when it’s dead silent and everyone’s asleep. It’s silent, he hears the clock ticking, hears his heartbeat and his shallow breaths, but never Clarke’s, and that’s how Bellamy knows she’s not here.

…

On one of his explorations in the empty rooms with Monty, Bellamy chances on an empty sketchbook and some pencils. “Clarke would have loved that,” Monty says, his voice rueful. Bellamy tells him he’s taking the supplies back to his room, much to Clarke’s delight.

But she’s too weak to hold the pencils and her hands tremble. Bellamy puts the sketchbook and pencils away and comforts Clarke from afar, tells her maybe they can try some other day.

Clarke tries not to be sad about it and instead asks Bellamy to draw for her. “You draw _for_ me,” she says, “and you draw _me_ ,” she suggests, perhaps thinking it would’ve been cute watching Bellamy try his hand at portraits. 

Bellamy laughs, half genuine and appreciating this side of her that makes light of her situation, half nervous and scared because there’s no way he could draw her like this. He lets her pose anyway, making her sit still despite not really looking at her. Bellamy recalls her features from his memories of their time in the ground. 

The portrait turns out rather awful, which elicits a laugh from Clarke that she fails to stifle. “Laugh all you want, Princess,” he replies, feigning hurt. He’s going to miss this.

…

When Raven gets the radio fixed, Bellamy tries contacting Octavia and the others underground. Clarke sits by him every single day, keeps him distracted from the hopelessness of it all, from the glaring reality that there’s no way to find out if everyone else is okay. The fear gets to him sometimes, but there’s greater comfort in knowing that there’s a fair chance Octavia’s still alive than the certainty of Clarke’s death sitting right beside you.

He always ends up looking at the stars and the earth through the large windows, at night. Clarke’s there, too, talking about how she used to stargaze on the Ark and made up stupid constellations as a kid. She confesses that she wishes he could have been there to tell her about the real constellations. She puts a smile on his face without any effort. Bellamy wishes it didn’t have to be this way. When they both get quiet, he tells her he’s sorry, and she asks him for what, and he says it’s nothing, but it’s everything and it’s eating him alive.

…

Clarke falls ill one morning, and Bellamy pleads for her to stay in bed. They share his room now, because it doesn’t make sense for a ghost to have her own.

Reluctantly she agrees, though he knows she’s only doing it for his sake. She lies in his bed, resting, peaceful, and seemingly alive had it not been for her mangled, burnt face and how her chest doesn’t rise or fall and how no air escapes from her lips. Bellamy goes about his day, baffled by how Clarke is ill but relieved that she’s still here.

Later that afternoon Bellamy brings back a small basin filled with cold water and some cloth to help break Clarke’s (nonexistent) fever. He’s glad she volunteers to do it herself, because he can’t bring himself to touch her in fear of hurting her. Clarke says the water stings. _Of course it does_ , he thinks to himself _, your skin is covered in burns._

After dinner, she insists on taking a shower to feel better. Bellamy obliges despite knowing it’s not worthwhile. He walks her to the showers and waits outside, until he hears Clarke’s small voice calling out his name, asking for help.

Clarke’s too weak to do anything, she realizes, and needs help undressing. “You sure?” he asks, checking if she’s comfortable, and preparing himself for the sight of her singed hair, her charred skin, and the burns all over her body. She says it’s okay, and he holds his breath as he helps her strip down to her underwear, for all the wrong reasons. Clarke is unrecognizable. The nightblood solution never worked. She never had a chance.

… 

It’s been a little more than a month since Praimfaya tonight, he thinks, maybe 39 or 40 days since. And in every single night that’s passed, he was never alone.

Clarke asks about how his day went. She’s sitting on the edge of his bed tonight, so much closer than they’ve ever been before. But they’re not touching—no touching, still.

Bellamy chuckles at her question and reminds her they’ve been together since breakfast. He wants to tell her to sit beside him, maybe give him a hug because he misses her so much. He doesn’t.

“Remember, back at Becca’s lab, when I was talking and you cut me off, and told me nothing was happening to me? I wanted to tell you something, you know.”

“Yeah?”

She stills and takes a deep breath. “I still don’t know how to say it.”

A beat, and then, “But I have to say this. I don’t know why, and it’s stupid because we have the next five years to do whatever we want in here, but,” she’s speaking terribly fast, and she pauses, “I feel like we don’t have much time.”

“Clarke. Stop. I can’t—"

“Bellamy, listen. Just let me say this.” Her voice is firm and sure, perhaps not of what she’s about to say, but that their time is running out.

He wants to hear her say it, and desperately so. Maybe hearing it from her lips will make the rest of his life bearable. Maybe it’ll provide some sort of closure, tying up loose ends and unfinished sentences, but he knows it won’t, and he doesn’t want any more pain.

“You’re dead, Clarke,” he finally says, breath shaky but stern, exhausted and angry, not at her but at himself for allowing this to happen at all. He carries the burden of losing his best friend, aware that it was his hand that pulled those rocket doors shut.

The tension in the air is heavy with the weight of the words Clarke could’ve said, had they been in any other circumstance. She doesn’t speak for a while, trying to make sense of things, or maybe realizing how everything suddenly made sense.

He’s silent, too, trying to find the words to say, but what is there to say to the ghost of the woman you love?

…

Clarke leaves sometime after midnight, doesn’t even bother opening and closing the door, because she’s fucking dead. Tomorrow when he wakes up she isn’t there, again, but when the lights are shut off she doesn’t come. Bellamy stays up until dawn waiting for her, though not without him dozing off for a couple minutes every now and then, and waking up in a cold sweat with her name on his lips.

He should’ve let her speak. What he’d give just to hear her say those words, now.

…

The next evening he dreams of her, though it doesn’t feel like a dream. Maybe it isn’t. He can’t be bothered to care.

“I’ll be back,” she promises, even if both of them know she’s gone for good.

Bellamy wants to tell her he’s sorry, more than anything, that he would have stayed with her on earth had she asked him. At some point he’s angry and blaming her for not being selfish for once, but he’s wordless in front of Clarke because she isn’t real, not anymore.

…

Bellamy never gets to say goodbye. He likes to think she never really left, that she can come back every so often. Sometimes he thinks he’s right when he finds dog-eared pages that hadn’t been there before in the book he found not long ago. Sometimes the pages are stained with tears that are far too dry to be real.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, he hears a soft melody from the piano across the ring that no one else seems to notice. Bellamy knows for sure that there’s only one person who could be behind it, and he lets her haunt him.

On a particularly cold night the lightbulb in his room flickers in such an odd way that he can’t help but think that it’s Clarke. He’d studied Morse code once on the Ark, and the flickering seems to spell out her name, but he brushes it off as another one of his delusions.

On most nights she’s nowhere to be found or felt, and as the days drag on he’s learned to stop looking for her. Still, his mind replays the memory of him closing those rocket doors shut moments before she arrived. His mistakes haunt him every single night, and he curses whatever god is out there, because is her ghost haunting him not already cruel enough?

A year later there was no trace of her left except in his dreams and nightmares and in the dog-eared pages of _The Odyssey_ he never bothered smoothening out. She left quietly, without a sound, and he hates himself for not noticing.

Bellamy knows she’s never coming back. Two years and four months later he stops hoping, but still she’s in his dreams, in the calls he hears muffled by static from a broken radio—‘ _i’m proud of you_ ,’ ‘ _i hope you’re alright_ ,’ a stray ‘ _i love you’_ when she’d thought she was dying, ‘ _i miss you’_ and ‘ _can you hear me_?’ on most days when she’s tired and hopeless. He doesn’t respond—he can’t—because it’s not real. She’s dead.

The days and nights are a blur and he stops keeping track of time. He finds himself sparring alone with Echo in the rec room on most mornings, getting a little too close for two supposed friends, and after this he’s ridden with an unshakable guilt. During these nights, he has trouble falling asleep.

Six years after the world ended they come back home and land on the ground, in the only patch of green they could see from space. Bellamy hopes—blindly, desperately—that Clarke is here, that by some miracle, she’d survived. That her ghost all those years ago was but a mere hallucination, a trick played by his grieving mind.

They land on the ground, and they’re met by prisoners from across space, and eventually Octavia and the others, but not Clarke, never Clarke.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter: @beIlamyblake (i know. i know you're thinking "didn't she imply that she wanted to be free of bellarke? why is her @ literally bellamy's name?" it's called mental illness luvs).
> 
> ps i do not actually know if there are pianos on the ring. or even showers. just look away.
> 
> also clarke ~disappears~ at the 40th day, because in some places (or religions) people believe that souls remain wandering the earth for 40 days after they die & on the 40th day they finally leave this world for the afterlife. hehe.


End file.
